Building a data culture is hard. It involves technology and people, each of which is complicated enough on its own. When you combine them[1] they get even harder together. Building a data culture takes time, effort, and money – and because it takes time, you don’t always know if the effort and money you’re investing will get you to where you need to go.
Measuring the success of your efforts can be as hard as the efforts themselves.
Very often the work involved in building a data culture doesn’t start neatly and cleanly with a clearly defined end state. It often starts messily, with organic bottom-up efforts combining with top-down efforts over a period of change that’s driven as much by external forces as by any single decision to begin. This means that measuring success – and defining what “success” means – happens while the work is being done.
Measuring usage is the easiest approach, but it’s not really measuring success. Does having more reports or more users actually produce more value?
For many organizations[2], success is measured in the bottom line – is the investment in building a data culture delivering the expected return from a financial perspective?
Having a data culture can make financial sense in two ways: it can reduce costs, and it can increase revenue.
Organizations often reduce costs by simplifying their data estate. This could involve standardizing on a single BI tool, or at least minimizing the number of tools used, migrating from older tools before they’re retired and decommissioned. This reduces costs directly by eliminating licensing expenses, and reduces costs indirectly by reducing the effort required for training, support, and related tasks. Measuring cost reduction can be straightforward – odds are someone is already tracking the IT budget – and measuring the reduction in the utilization of legacy tools can also take advantage of existing usage reporting.
Organizations can increase revenue by building more efficient, data-driven business processes. This is harder to measure. Typically this involves instrumenting the business processes in question, and proactively building the processes to correlate data culture efforts to business process outcomes.
In the video I mention the work of several enterprise Power BI customers who have build Power BI apps for their information workers and salespeople. These apps provide up-to-date data and insights for employees who would otherwise need to rely on days- or weeks-old batch data delivered via email or printout. By tracking which employees are using what aspects of the Power BI apps, the organizations can correlate this usage with the business outcomes of the employees’ work[3]. If a person or team’s efficiency increases as data usage increases, it’s hard to argue with that sort of success.
But.. this post and video assume that you have actually set explicit goals. Have you? If you haven’t defined that strategy, you definitely want to check out next week’s video…
[1] Especially since you usually have organizational politics thrown into the mix for good measure, and that never makes things any simpler.
[2] I originally typed “most organizations” but I don’t have the data to support that assertion. This is true of most of the mature enterprise organizations that I’ve worked with, but I suspect that for a broader population, most organizations don’t actually measure – they just cross their fingers and do what they can.
[3] Odds are someone is already tracking things like sales, so the “business outcomes” part of this approach might be simpler than you might otherwise assume. Getting access to the data and incorporating it in a reporting solution may not be straightforward, but it’s likely the data itself already exists for key business processes.